APIs: Automation is Great. So is Usability

Many developers are not so great at documentation. Ask anyone who’s been thrown into a large code base. Changes aren’t documented well, tribal knowledge thrives in the code comments, and anyone who says, “I’m confused, what does this chunk of spaghetti code mean?” is often treated with annoyance or even disdain.

That is something that DevOps doesn’t change. And there are, as with so many things in IT right now, complicating factors. First is APIs. In almost every shop, developers are responsible for the public-facing APIs. The same developers who don’t comment well are now documenting public-facing APIs. The other complicating factor is DevOps documentation mechanisms. Automated systems generate API documentation from developer comments. Again, the same developers that often don’t document their code well enough to efficiently on-board new developers.

Those of us who have used more than a couple of APIs know the problem intimately. Dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of us have to search for what the allowable values for a parameter or JSON field are in an API call are because far too often that is not well-documented.

The whole system grew naturally. APIs are the realm of developers; documentation was painful to get created because it required tech writers that were advanced enough to understand the purpose and function of the API; and development of documentation delayed API deployment—all are issues that lent themselves to automated generation and the developer in the code was best-situated to document it. In the API economy, and in light of both agile and DevOps, it just made sense to use generated documentation for this part of the project.

But we’ve got enough experience now to know that “good enough” isn’t. Far too often users are left to figure out the details, and quite often, those users don’t bother. That’s not a benefit in the API economy; it’s a risk.

Get Help With Your APIs

And it’s pretty easily resolvable. Get someone not knee deep in the code to try and use your API as documented. Get their recommendations on usability, and fix the issues they find. I’ve used APIs that have a dozen JSON base parameters, none of which are documented as to what’s allowed or not. I’ve used APIs where the JSON field was text, but the values were from a specialized list that was not made public and users had to hunt for allowed values. We’ve all been through it, and it is a massive waste of time.

If you have a customer base, use Alpha/Beta users to help with this process. Early access is generally people who know the project/product, so feedback will be more focused, but as outsiders they do not share in tribal knowledge. Without tribal knowledge, they will have solid input to improve API usability.

And in the end, an API is a consumable that you want customers to use. Telling them how to do so is important. And the current trendy way of doing so is not good enough. So make certain your process is good enough, or accept user loss as a consequence.

For those with established products/projects, do not wag your head and assume you have it covered. Some very cool, long-lived APIs have entire sets of JSON input values that are not well-documented. They were important enough to make them parameters (or return values for that matter), yet you didn’t document them well? Please, ask new users if they agree with your assessment of your API.

Don’t have time/man hours/whatever to address documentation shortcomings in your API? Then don’t publish an API. The only thing worse than saying, “You can’t integrate via API with our system,” is saying, “You can integrate with our system via API,” then not documenting it well enough to do so.

So keep the automation. But follow the new mantra:

Now that you have generated documentation, check that you have usable documentation.

And keep kicking it. APIs are the hard part, telling people how to use them is comparatively easy, so take the time to make your development efforts worthwhile.

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